Making wine at home

[ChrisN]

Hi Everyone,
I’m interested in trying to make my own wine at home and wondered if anyone knows of some good detailed books that explain the process with recipes to own that would help a beginner like me? I have some of the needed supplies to make wine. Thank you very much! Chris

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

I made all grain beer quite a bit. The principles are about the same. Unless you're starting from the grapes, the home wine kits you get come with instructions.

Read the ingredients. Better juice will make better wine. Most kits have had their volume reduced and had sugar added. In Edmonton, the Italian grocery store brings in fresh juice around now that's the real deal.

The few times I've bought wine kits, I only used the juice. They often come with additives for clarification, and sterilization. They also come with dried yeast and often oak chips, and sometimes pomace. I recommend throwing the clarifying stuff, like isinglass and bentonite out. It's not the worst thing to do but it's an unnecessary step done because people want their wine done in a month. Unless you want sweet wine, or are bad at keeping everything sanitary, you don't need sulphites to kill the yeast. The juice in those boxes is already sterile. Otherwise, for off-dry, you can adjust the residual sugar and profile by choosing a different yeast strain - check out Wyeast's website. You only need clarifying if you're a nerd and are impatient.

The process, simplified is. Sanitize bucket, pour juice in bucket, (add unchlorinated water if juice is a concentrate), and add yeast. After 4-7 days, transfer wine to sanitized carboy by siphoning with a hose and racking cane. Install airlock on carboy. After a month, rack to another carboy. If oak is recommended for the style you're making, add it to the new carboy. Add airlock. Watch over the next couple months as it stratifies, and it'll be ready when the solids are precipitated out and settled. You could bottle earlier if you don't care about clarity. I would guess if the airlock only bubbles about once every 15 minutes, (at room temperature), it's probably safe to bottle. Carefully siphon into sterilized bucket. Fill sterilized bottles from the bottom of the bottle, up (with a tube). Cap, or cork.

Note: a hygrometer meant for beer or wine is needed to measure the density of the wine before and after the yeast goes in so you know how much alcohol their is.

 

[GreenDragon]

Find a local home brew supply store near you. The people that run these stores are pretty universally nice people who love to discuss the craft. Go make friends and brew a batch. You learn by doing. I tell people that if they can boil water they can brew. Just make sure to sanitize anything that touches the wine well. Bleach is cheap and effective. Go forth and have fun!

 

[Plinsc]

I prefer one step for the sanitizer

 

[Laredo]

I’m not a wine fan, so I’ve never made any. I have made hard apple cider and have done some all grain brewing. I think I read on here that you have been to the Homebrew Talk forums, but if not, check it out. Tons of info there. The biggest issue I had with making hard cider was to not have it taste like wine. I never totally got it to where I wanted it, but it was good. Not sickenly sweet like most ciders now days. I would say it was semi-dry. Around a 1.012 specific gravity.

If you want a sweet or semi sweet, I would ferment until dry and let everything settle out naturally. I don’t like using the clarifiers. Then rack it off in a clean carboy and add 1.4 grams potassium metabisulphite and 6.25 grams of potassium sorbate for each 5 gallons of wine. The k-meta and sorbate will keep any yeast that is still in your ferment from reproducing. You can now add sugar to sweeten to your taste without worrying about reviving fermentation. For my hard cider, I would sweeten with frozen apple juice concentrate to add more apple flavor.

For sanitation, I use Star San.

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

The Complete Joy of Homebrewing by Papazian recommended bleach. He said all the other stuff is a waste of money unless you have a septic tank.

 

[johnny108]

Are you making grape or fruit wines?
For fruit wine recipes:

https://swguildpa.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Jack-Keller-Complete-Requested-Recipes-Collection.pdf

I worked in a home brew store for 5 years- I’ve owned/ read all the books: all have pluses and minuses, but I’ve never found a good “universal” book.
The internet pretty much has everything you want/need to know, for free.

 

[Old Gasman]

I make (and drink) a lot of homemade wine and while it's nice to gather fruit to make it it's not always possible. However you can make a very drinkable wine from supermarket fruit juice. Just make sure it's pure juice without any artificial sweeteners because you can't ferment artificial sweeteners and your wine will always finish sweet.

 

[johnny108]

Supermarket cider and apple juice , with some sugar to bump it up to 10%abv, fermented with a competitive wine yeast like k1v-1116 makes a great, and easy hard cider, which can be fortified in the freezer (if legal in your area) to a 20% wine, which, when sweetened with some concentrated apple juice, makes a nice apple “port”.
Black cherry juice works well, in the same way.

 

[ChrisN]

Thank you very much, everyone! Greatly appreciate it. Sorry for my delay. Just been busy with everything.
If I have a preference I’m more of a beer guy. I love a lot of different beers but mostly German beers (Hefeweizen and dunkelweizen). I have made my own beer from extract kits but haven’t made it from all grain. The only problem is I have heard it can be a lot of work if I wanted to grow/culture my own ingredients to make beer. However, I have heard wine is more forgiving and easier. We also have cherry trees and growing peach trees. I love a wide range of booze - beer, wine, brandy, rum, whiskey, etc you name it, I probably like it lol. So basically I will happily settle for whatever is easiest, forgiving, and bonus - cheaper.
I am on the homebrew talk forum. It is a great forum but thought I would ask here and see . If anyone wants a good beer book I highly recommend this one. It’s great! It has a step by step process and recipes. It really is worth every penny.
I will for sure copy the comments and print them out for my notes like I do all things. The one thing about me is i struggle with memorization. I can’t read it once and memorize it. I have to physically do it over and over (repetition) and ask questions as I do it for it to sink in. Or I have to read it over and over for it to sink in but I learn better by practice. I print my notes and come back to it when needed and then I notice new details that I missed before.
Anyway, enough rambling. Thank you very much again everyone!

Homebrewing book

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

When I made all grain beer, I found it pretty simple. I think people overthink it. I used two separate 4 gallon pots. All of the grain went in to one pot and it was a fairly thick mash. I stirred a lot while heating on the stovetop, and held temperature in a warm oven until it passed the iodine-starch test. I had a bucket with holes in the bottom with a grain bag in it suspended above my primary. I put the grain in there and let it drain. Squeeze. The second pot, only contained water at 170°F. I then poured that through. I know there's are some pretty elaborate ways of sparging, but the specific gravity of the last bit of wort to run through was pretty insignificant. Then, for the boil, I split the wort between the two pots. The only additional equipment above that of kit brewing was the mill, two pots, a bucket with holes, and a grain bag.

 

[johnny108]

If it’s legal in your area…..or if you’re just curious:

Distillers Wiki

homedistiller.org

 

[GreenDragon]

I highly recommend Austin Home Brew's mini-mash kits. They are pretty much all I brew now. About 80% of your sugars are from extract, but the other 20 percent is from whole grain (about a gallon of volume). I think it gives the beer more depth of flavor than just the extract kits but not nearly the hassle (in terms of space and equipment) as full whole grain. You can use the same equipment as all extract. It adds about one extra hour of brew time.

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

If you're in Canada, you might be able to get Paddock Wood brewery wort, which is straight up, unconcentrated wort that's ready to pitch. It's amazing stuff.

 

[Laredo]

When I do all grain brewing, I use a 10 gallon round cooler, like the orange or blue ones you can get from Home Depot or Lowe’s. There are companies out there that make false bottoms to fit these mash tun coolers. They are about the ideal size to do a 5 gallon batch. I think the biggest beer I mad in mine was a Russian Imperial Stout that had 20+ pounds of grain in it.

I didn’t do too much with rinsing the grains. I basically did a batch sparge. At the time, I had a subscription to the Beersmith software and that made it super easy to figure out your recipes and amount of sparge water. I would preheat the water in the cooler with a 1500W immersion heater, dough in the grains, hold at the desired temp for 60 to 90 minutes, drain the wort, dump in all the sparge water, stir, let sit a few minutes, and then drain again and start the boil. I was able to hit 75 to 80% efficiency with that method and not a lot of expensive equipment was needed.

Brewing beer isn’t difficult and you can make a nice beer with minimal equipment. You can also get super fancy with it and spend tons of money. I think the most important topics are temperature and PH. Sanitation is also up there, but I never had any infections so it was as easy a spraying with Star San for me. The PH during mashing is important for the alpha and beta Amylase to do their job of converting the starches to sugars. You can vary the mash temp to produce more or less unfermentable sugars. PH is also important during fermentation to keep the yeast happy, but I think temperature during fermentation is more important. Push the yeast too hard by being too hot or cold can produce some off flavors.

I never bought any books on the subject, just searched the internet when I ran into issues. Making beer can be as simple or as complex as you make it. I built a big cabinet that serves as a kegerator and a fermentation chamber. It can hold 6 five gallon kegs, has 5 taps, and heating and cooling in the upper fermentation chamber. when I had it up and running I used a RaspberryPi and a couple Arduino boards to control each chamber. Cooling came from a refrigeration unit from a vending machine.

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

When I do all grain brewing, I use a 10 gallon round cooler, like the orange or blue ones you can get from Home Depot or Lowe’s. There are companies out there that make false bottoms to fit these mash tun coolers. They are about the ideal size to do a 5 gallon batch. I think the biggest beer I mad in mine was a Russian Imperial Stout that had 20+ pounds of grain in it.

I didn’t do too much with rinsing the grains. I basically did a batch sparge. At the time, I had a subscription to the Beersmith software and that made it super easy to figure out your recipes and amount of sparge water. I would preheat the water in the cooler with a 1500W immersion heater, dough in the grains, hold at the desired temp for 60 to 90 minutes, drain the wort, dump in all the sparge water, stir, let sit a few minutes, and then drain again and start the boil. I was able to hit 75 to 80% efficiency with that method and not a lot of expensive equipment was needed.

Brewing beer isn’t difficult and you can make a nice beer with minimal equipment. You can also get super fancy with it and spend tons of money. I think the most important topics are temperature and PH. Sanitation is also up there, but I never had any infections so it was as easy a spraying with Star San for me. The PH during mashing is important for the alpha and beta Amylase to do their job of converting the starches to sugars. You can vary the mash temp to produce more or less unfermentable sugars. PH is also important during fermentation to keep the yeast happy, but I think temperature during fermentation is more important. Push the yeast too hard by being too hot or cold can produce some off flavors.

I never bought any books on the subject, just searched the internet when I ran into issues. Making beer can be as simple or as complex as you make it. I built a big cabinet that serves as a kegerator and a fermentation chamber. It can hold 6 five gallon kegs, has 5 taps, and heating and cooling in the upper fermentation chamber. when I had it up and running I used a RaspberryPi and a couple Arduino boards to control each chamber. Cooling came from a refrigeration unit from a vending machine.

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Sounds like a very easy way to do it. What prevents the grain from plugging up the drain spout?
I was doing it before I had the internet, and I always had a page for math, opposite my recipes in my lab book.

I became aware of ways to increase temperature by adding volumes of hot water, instead of by heating. I imagine that software would be able to do the math for that?

 

[Knucklehead]

When I do all grain brewing, I use a 10 gallon round cooler, like the orange or blue ones you can get from Home Depot or Lowe’s. There are companies out there that make false bottoms to fit these mash tun coolers. They are about the ideal size to do a 5 gallon batch. I think the biggest beer I mad in mine was a Russian Imperial Stout that had 20+ pounds of grain in it.

I didn’t do too much with rinsing the grains. I basically did a batch sparge. At the time, I had a subscription to the Beersmith software and that made it super easy to figure out your recipes and amount of sparge water. I would preheat the water in the cooler with a 1500W immersion heater, dough in the grains, hold at the desired temp for 60 to 90 minutes, drain the wort, dump in all the sparge water, stir, let sit a few minutes, and then drain again and start the boil. I was able to hit 75 to 80% efficiency with that method and not a lot of expensive equipment was needed.

Brewing beer isn’t difficult and you can make a nice beer with minimal equipment. You can also get super fancy with it and spend tons of money. I think the most important topics are temperature and PH. Sanitation is also up there, but I never had any infections so it was as easy a spraying with Star San for me. The PH during mashing is important for the alpha and beta Amylase to do their job of converting the starches to sugars. You can vary the mash temp to produce more or less unfermentable sugars. PH is also important during fermentation to keep the yeast happy, but I think temperature during fermentation is more important. Push the yeast too hard by being too hot or cold can produce some off flavors.

I never bought any books on the subject, just searched the internet when I ran into issues. Making beer can be as simple or as complex as you make it. I built a big cabinet that serves as a kegerator and a fermentation chamber. It can hold 6 five gallon kegs, has 5 taps, and heating and cooling in the upper fermentation chamber. when I had it up and running I used a RaspberryPi and a couple Arduino boards to control each chamber. Cooling came from a refrigeration unit from a vending machine.

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That is a beautiful cabinet!

 

[deluxestogie]

The ancient ways of natural wine are finding new fans

Natural wine is gaining a following in the U.S. even as overall wine sales drop. Natural wine has no definition, but it's usually made with organic grapes and fermented naturally, with no additives.

apnews.com

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

The ancient ways of natural wine are finding new fans

Natural wine is gaining a following in the U.S. even as overall wine sales drop. Natural wine has no definition, but it's usually made with organic grapes and fermented naturally, with no additives.

apnews.com

My wife is really into natural wine. There's a lot of it being brought into Alberta because of some passionate promoters of it. Some dude named Eric in Calgary runs a club called Juice where you get regular drops of new natural wines. Message me if you want more info. There's also even a lot being produced in BC. You just missed orange wine week in Edmonton. This one was pretty great.

 

[johnny108]

Hard cider made in the French (pre-WW2) way is pretty impressive; delicate, light, and sweet, but, low alcohol.
It was/is a natural method, too.